Museum of Croydon: I Am Here podcasts
Jun 30th, 2010 • Category: Case studies
Brief
Finding new ways to engage young audiences is an essential part of the remit of museums and art galleries. In spring 2010 the Museum of Croydon asked us to work with a group of young people, aged between 14 and 18, to produce audio podcasts based on exhibits in the museum.
Approach
I Am Here was part of Stories of the World – one of the Cultural Olympiad’s major projects. The aim was to allow local people to become ‘curators’ of collections and objects held in museums, libraries and archives.
Each participant in the I Am Here project chose two objects from the museum’s collection to feature in the podcasts, selecting items that they related to and which they felt said something about their identity.
We ran five training sessions at the museum, teaching the teenagers how to create a podcast from scratch and how to use techniques such as storyboarding, sound recording and audio production.
The young people were incredibly eager and quickly mastered the equipment and the development process, from recording to editing. They produced some extremely powerful stories.
Outcome
The 16 podcasts are available on the Museum of Croydon website and you can also listen to them while walking around the museum as an alternative tour of the collection. The museum’s interactive content was already excellent and it was great to work with them to develop it even further.
What the Museum of Croydon says
“We were impressed with the way sounddelivery worked with and enabled the project’s young people to create high quality, engaging podcasts.” Gemma Sturtridge, Assistant Collections Officer, Croydon Museum Service
Listen to our work
Hanna compares a WWII dog tag to her school exam number:
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Kadeem’s poem A Taste of Feeling describes the decline in the use of a typewriter:
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